André Gide (1869–1951,) fully André Paul Guillaume Gide, was a French novelist, writer, and diarist. This winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as one of France’s most celebrated novelists.
Born to a middle-class Protestant family in Paris, Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (1891,) at age 22. In 1893 and 1894, Gide journeyed to Northern Africa, where he became very ill and narrowly escaped death. This decisive event led him to question his puritanical upbringing. It formed the basis for a pair of his renowned psychological novels, The Immoralist (1902,) about pleasure-seeking and yearning for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909,) about the complexities of adolescence, love, asceticism, and sacrifice.
Gide published several semi-autobiographical narratives, essays, and memoirs. His works are characterized by the tensions in his life, viz., conflict and compromise between a sense of social moralities and individuality and the need for acceptance despite his controversial personal life and beliefs. In another famous novel, The Counterfeiters (1926,) Gide exposed the hypocrisy of insincere people. He also served as a literary critic and translated William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Andre Gide
All these books have lived together … inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adversity
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adventure
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age
—Andre Gide
Topics: Youth
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing, Madness, Literature
The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intuition
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Argument
Long only for what you have.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Gratitude, Appreciation, Blessings
February 13, 1951. No! I cannot claim that with the end of this notebook, of the notebook, all will be settled, that all will have been done. Perhaps I will have the desire to add to this again. To add something. To add. Perhaps. To add to this again at the last moment
—Andre Gide
Topics: Legacy
It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached at an angle.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Ideas, Perseverance
Not everyone can be an orphan.
—Andre Gide
Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother’s breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. … Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Humanity
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.
—Andre Gide
In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Self-Discovery
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intelligence
No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Assumptions, Theory
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Change
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
The belief that becomes truth to me is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action.
—Andre Gide
Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Truth
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Prejudice
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Art
Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Gratitude, Acceptance, Blessings, Appreciation
Before I explain my book to others, I expect them to explain it to me. To claim to explain it first is to immediately narrow down its reach; for if we know what we intended to say, we do not know whether we said only that. – One always says more than THAT. – And what interests me most is what I put in without knowing, – that unconscious share, which I would like to call God’s share.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Anxiety, Fear
“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Knowledge, Self-Discovery
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Conversation
We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Being Ourselves
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Listening, Experience
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